New Accessibility Features Coming To Android

For years technologists have designed products for the majority, with a few features for that niche group of people who are visually impaired or have other disabilities preventing them from using smartphones and tablets and even notebooks as easily as other people can.

But that niche is actually very large, specially when you consider the elderly, who may be facing reduced visual acuity but are certainly mentally active enough to be productive.

Anyone with an illness or with ageing that causes tremors or hands to shake or other motor disability. No reason why this big chunk of the population should be left out of using technology. At least Google doesn't think so and accordingly, the company is releasing tweaks to Android as well as a Voice Access app coming soon which will help people navigate their phones and usage much more easily. And this will be implanted, from the next version of Android, from the very setting up of a device.

Today, when you set up a new device, the screen is blindingly bright and the text minuscule. With that, a user has to wade through making selections and choices and entering text... Until finally getting deep into Settings, enabling larger more comfortable text size and sometimes, contrast. Soon however, the very start of a device will involve options to make the on boarding easier. Including with voice.

And a set of features everyone will likely end up using is in an app boringly called Voice Access. This is in test phase at the moment. But when it becomes available soon, users can turn to it to control the device with voice commands. This will, it is expected, be more natural and intuitive than using the talk-back feature for people who have blindness.

It's heartening to see accessibility features such as these being baked into an operating system as commonly used as Android. Chrome also already does incorporate accessibility add one.